Colonial category of the native stopped at each colony’s drawn boundary.

Evidence

The word also implied that in their common inferiority, the inlanders were equally contemptible, no matter what ethnolinguistic group or class they came from. Yet even this miserable equality of condition had a definite perimeter. For inlander always raised the question ‘native of what?’. If the Dutch sometimes spoke as if inlanders were a world-category, experience showed that this notion was hardly sustainable in practice. Inlanders stopped at the coloured colony’s drawn edge. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 462

Categorization

• QUESTION: The way a supposedly universal category (‘native’) was actually bounded per-colony is worth chasing — how did boundaries of exclusion get drawn in different colonial administrations?
• XREF: connects to: Colonial ethnic categories broke down under acts both personal and political; Colonial classifications imposed race categories that subjects never recognized as their own — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 650; Colonial categories formed in the same ambiguous space as scientific objects (+3 more)

Related

• Colonial exclusion categories sedimented into the national identity of the colonized (similarity 0.84)
• Colonial labels made the colonized simultaneously inferior and belonging to the land. (similarity 0.83)
• Colonial classifications imposed race categories that subjects never recognized as their own (similarity 0.82)
• Colonial cartography created nations whose borders match neither history nor language. (similarity 0.82)
• Colonial classification suppressed internal diversity under one inaccurate label (similarity 0.81)
• Colonial racial categories resisted stable definition by officials themselves (similarity 0.80)
• Colonial ethnic categories broke down under acts both personal and political (similarity 0.80)
• Eighteenth-century classification reduced heterogeneous peoples to orderable types (similarity 0.79)
• The negative category of the inlander crystallized into the positive identity ‘Indonesian’. (similarity 0.78)
• Colonial category terms could mark several distinct groups at once (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Colonial classifications imposed race categories that subjects never recognized as their own #corroborates (0.85) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 650
• Colonial ethnic categories broke down under acts both personal and political #corroborates (0.80)
• Colonial cartography created nations whose borders match neither history nor language. #expands (0.80) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 507
• Inconsistencies in colonial racial categories reveal latent distinctions rather than errors #corroborates (0.78)
• Colonial categories failed to capture the diverse mixed-ethnic groups hiding from plantations #corroborates (0.78)
• Colonial categories formed in the same ambiguous space as scientific objects #corroborates (0.72)